Project Summary ? Abstract RFA-FD-18-001 The Flexible Funding Model - Infrastructure Development and Maintenance for State Manufactured Food Regulatory Programs (FFM) 5 year grant opportunity focuses on the creation, development and maintenance of long-term sustainable efforts at the state and local levels to improve capabilities in human and animal food regulatory programs. The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) is the lead state agency for both food and feed safety with authority to oversee all the segments of the farm-to-fork continuum. The over-arching goal and vision in Michigan is to maintain a high quality regulatory food program and continue to grow and enhance its multi-disciplinary, multi-divisional integrated capacity to respond to food and feed issues within the agency, while improving the effective working relationships with the FDA-Detroit Office, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Michigan's 45 Local Health Departments, academia and industry stakeholders. Through the FFM project, Michigan's manufactured food regulatory program standards (MFRPS) program, Food Protection Task Force, and Rapid Response Team (RRT) program, along with special projects opportunities would become more cohesive. The grant opportunity would allow Michigan to improve its capabilities to help advance a national integrated food safety system by continuing to build and maintain a transferable working model of food regulatory best practices along with the implementation and integration of advanced rapid response capacities using the Incident Command System (ICS) and the principles outlined in the RRT Best Practices Manual.